No, This is the Endgame of the Left

This week, the trailer for the latest installment in the Hunger Games series, Mockingjay, was released. As I was watching this trailer, something really struck me: the themes touched on in this film are essentially the endgame of today’s American liberalism.

An all-controlling Big Government that forces unity, prosperity; it’s government that calls on you to sacrifice for the greater good. I am not suggesting that today’s Democrat Party will lead us literally to the society depicted in the Hunger Games series, but there are some lessons we can learn when we watch these films based on the dystopian novels.

One of the first things we can learn is that in an attempt to create a utopia, liberal policies and ultimate government control has the opposite effect. Creating a centralized government that is too powerful and dictates what all citizens must do for what they deem as the “greater good” is what we conservatives have been fighting so hard against, especially these past several years.

The trailer that Bossie links to begins with a "Capitol TV" logo, which indicates that there's still electricity around to power the monitors. That puts the Hunger Games' futuristic American dystopia one up on today's dystopian Venezuela where AP reports that "A power plant failure knocked out electricity across a big swath of Venezuela on Friday, darkening the lights at a nationally televised presidential ceremony and forcing a suspension of subway and train services around the country," and North Korea, where it's Earth Hour, every hour. Or as Virginia Postrel said in 1999:

The Khmer Rouge sought to start over at Year Zero, and to sort of create the kind of society that very civilized, humane greens write about as though it were an ideal. I mean, people who would never consider genocide. But I argue that if you want to know what that would take, look at Cambodia -- to empty the cities and turn everyone into peasants again. Even in a less developed country, let alone in someplace like the United States, that these sort of static utopian fantasies are just that.

And speaking of dystopias, in "The Eternal Dictator," NRO's Kevin D. Williamson writes, "The ruthless exercise of power by strongmen and generalissimos is the natural state of human affairs:"

When I was visiting Madrid a few years back, I sat drinking coffee on one of that city’s beautiful public squares and watching the Spanish go about their business — walking to work, shopping, flirting, reading newspapers, enjoying the sun — and I wondered: How is it that these people — these civilized, elegant heirs to Cervantes, Velázquez, and Ignatius of Loyola — manage to inflict upon themselves a cartoonish dictator such as Francisco Franco? (The answer, of course, is: by narrowly avoiding inflicting on themselves a Russian dictator rather than a Spanish one.) I am not much of a multiculturalist; there are some societies that one expects to be governed under roughly the same principles around which a baboon troop or a cackle of hyenas is organized. But the Greeks? The Germans? The Italians? The Norwegians, for Pete’s sake? If it can happen to them — and it has — it can happen to anybody.

The worrisome lesson of history is that there is no shortage of strongmen and generalissimos, and their holding power and exercising it ruthlessly is the natural state of human affairs. Nobody has to do anything to make that happen; it’s making that not happen that requires our attention.

One of the worrisome lessons of 2008 and early 2009 is that, as in post-World War I Germany and Italy, there are also no shortage of leftwing media talking heads and intellectuals in America who believe that a dictatorship would be a really super cool and groovy thing -- as long as they're the ones running the Hunger Games.